Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Panic Patrol: Field reports from the front lines of overreaction

  What should we be afraid of next?

  Panic Patrol is historical satire with a purpose.

  The stories we explore are rooted in real episodes of public anxiety, technological fear, cultural backlash, and good old-fashioned panic. We research the history, track down original sources wherever possible, and then use storytelling, comedy, filmmaking, and generative AI to bring those moments to life.

  Our goal is not to recreate history perfectly.

  It’s to make you curious about it.

Two examples:

• The Teddy Bear Menace
  The 1907 panic over teddy bears, threatened maternal instincts, and the terrifying prospect of children choosing their own toys.
  
• The Headphones of Doom
  The 1980s panic over the Walkman, public solitude, and the terrifying prospect of choosing your own soundtrack.
  
• "We were looking at it wrong": The explosive claim that's upended the AI world

  Interview with Nick Cammarata

  It has long been accepted that the mechanisms inside neural networks, the software that underpins most AI models, are very hard-perhaps impossible- to unpick fully. That's because when the networks are trained, they appear to take on weird, tangled structures that make no sense to a human. Researchers like to say today's AI is grown like a garden, not built like a bridge.
  ...
  In a series of posts on X, Hilton notes that researchers understand less than 0.01% of the inner workings of top-tier LLMs. "I always appreciate Nick [Cammarata]'s boundless optimism when we hang out, but unfortunately this is giving the public an unrealistic picture of the state of the field," he wrote. "For a full understanding, we need to go beyond neurons, and explain how they connect together to form circuits. How is this going? If we are aiming for a full understanding, things are not looking good!"

• Case study: Brain tumor linked to intense spiritual interest, religious delusions and psychosis

  She said she started experiencing the "heavenly" voices three years before, which were diagnosed as persistent auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH). She also said she went through multiple periods of intense spiritual interest and devotion starting at the age of 13 and reoccurring at ages 23, 32, and 41.

  MRI brain scans revealed she had a slowly growing brain tumor affecting the posterior thalamus, the posterior putamen, the dorsal internal capsule, and parts of the left external globus pallidus. These areas of the brain have been linked to auditory processing, emotional regulation, and spiritual experiences.

• Four Lenses That Explain Everything (Including God)

  Samir Varma

  Here's a provocative claim: every field of human study - anthropology, psychology, law, art, religion, all of it - reduces, at bottom, to exactly four things: physics, mathematics, computer science, and economics.

  This isn't vulgar reductionism. I'm not saying "everything is just atoms" and leaving it there. These four are irreducible lenses on a single underlying reality. You need all four. You can't collapse one into another. And when you apply them systematically, problems that have defeated philosophy for millennia suddenly crack open.

  Also the author's book The Science of Free Will.

• An Open Letter to Scott Alexander

  By Steven Pinker

  The dangers of AI are real, including bioterrorism, cyber-sabotage, and unconstrained agents. I’m strongly in favour of sober safety evaluations and engineering best practices: independent oversight, mandatory investigations of accidents, liability for damage, humans in the loop, kill switches, and others. On these I trust that you and I agree. I'm just sceptical of the prophecy that AI will murder every last human and of the assumption that sowing such dread is the most effective way of getting such safeguards.